Orange County vs. Gavin Newsom
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It all started when the weather took a turn for the better. Surfers and beachgoers flocked to Orange County shores, only to find them cordoned off, at the behest of Governor Gavin Newsom. Protestors took to the streets in Huntington Beach, demanding an end to the shutdowns. The demonstrations weren't huge. But, in the world of Republican politics, you ignore Orange County at your own peril.
Guest: Gustavo Arellano, writer at the Los Angeles Times and host of L.A. Times podcast Coronavirus in California. He’s also the author of Orange County: A Personal History.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone. Just a quick note before we launch into the show. My guest today, Gustavo Areano, he's a writer at the LA Times. He also hosts its excellent podcast, coronavirus in California. Every weekday, Gustavo talks to Californians who are in the thick of this pandemic. Be sure to go check it out wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, here's the show. |
| 0:26.2 | If you want to know about Orange County, California, there is basically one guy that you call, Gustavo Arellano. |
| 0:34.0 | I'm like the three-eyed raven of Orange County. I can tell you everything that's ever happened in Orange County, everything that's happening right now and everything that's going to come to Orange County. |
| 0:43.3 | Gustavo writes for the LA Times. He used to edit the OC weekly. He was born and raised here. So when I started to see these videos of protesters in the O.C. |
| 0:59.2 | People demanding access to beaches that the governor had shut down to stop the spread of COVID-19. |
| 1:03.0 | Gustavo, he was the guy I wanted to talk to. |
| 1:05.7 | There's a lot of frustration here in Huntington Beach. |
| 1:09.2 | People feel the governor is overreaching. |
| 1:14.8 | These protests seemed fundamentally different than the ones I'd seen elsewhere. |
| 1:18.2 | People were fighting for their right to surf. |
| 1:19.8 | I'm going to come here anyway. |
| 1:21.6 | What are they going to do? |
| 1:25.5 | Until they stop me physically, yeah, I will go. |
| 1:32.1 | On Twitter, I was having a conversation with a father who was arguing that the LA Times, |
| 1:35.0 | the paper that I worked for, that we shouldn't have been covering these protests, that were just amplifying their message. |
| 1:37.3 | And my response to them is if you're not paying attention to what's happening, especially |
| 1:40.8 | here in Orange County, you know, you're going to regret it. |
| 1:43.6 | Let's put it that way. Gustavo knows it's tempting to write off people who write their protest slogans on |
| 1:49.6 | surfboards. But he also understands the way some of these folks are feeling, cooped up, trapped, |
| 1:57.2 | worried about their financial future. Yeah, look, no one is happy about these stay-at-home ordinances. I'm not happy about them. My wife, she runs a restaurant. Her business, of course, has been eviscerated. At least it's still open, but I have to work shifts now there. I literally wash dishes and I'm the cashier because on top of my reporting duties for the L.A. Times because she can't afford to pay |
| 2:18.8 | her staff right now. So no one is happy with these things. And Gustavo says, when these fights about |
| 2:25.0 | opening up the country reach Orange County, they're different. Not because of what they look like, |
... |
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